Perhaps at this very moment the man who has written so many stories of football games is writing another. In fancy I can hear the click of his typewriting machine. He is fighting, it seems, to maintain a certain position in life, a house by the sea, an automobile and he blames that fact on his wife, and on his daughter who wanted to go to Vassar.
He is fighting to maintain his position in life and at the same time there is another fight going on. On that day in the hotel in the city of New York he told me, with tears in his eyes, that he wanted to grow up, to let his fanciful life keep pace with his physical life but that the magazine editors would not let him. He blamed the editors of magazines—he blamed his wife and daughter—as I remember our conversation, he did not blame himself.
Perhaps he did not dare let his fanciful life mature to keep pace with his physical life. He lives in America, where as yet to mature in one’s fanciful life is thought of as something like a crime.
In any event there he is, haunting my fancy. As the man running in the streets will always stay in his fancy, disturbing him when he wants to be thinking out new plots for football stories, so he will always stay in my fancy—unless, well unless I can unload him into the fanciful lives of you readers.
As the matter stands I see him now as I saw him on that Winter evening long ago. He is standing at the door of my room with the strained look in his eyes and is bewailing the fact that after our talk he will have to go back to his own room and begin writing another football story.
He speaks of that as one might speak of going to prison and then the door of my room closes and he is gone. I hear his footsteps in the hallway.
My own hands are trembling a little. “Perhaps his fate is also my own,” I am telling myself. I hear his human footsteps in the hallway of the hotel and then through my mind go the words of the poet Sandburg he has quoted to me:
“Such a beautiful pail of fish, such a beautiful peck of apples, I cannot bring you now. It is too early and I am not footloose yet.”
The words of the American poet rattle in my head and then I turn my eyes to the floor where my destroyed Balzac is lying. The soft brown leather back is uninjured and now again, in fancy, the name of the author is staring at me. The name is stamped on the back of the book in letters of gold.
From the floor of my room the name Balzac is grinning ironically up into my own American face.